Gun registry: Trudeau throws evidence-based policies into the wind

Among the various contradictory things that Liberal leadership candidate Justin Trudeau has said about the Canadian long-gun registry is this: “The definition of a failed public policy is the fact that the long-gun registry is no more … because it was so deeply divisive for far too many people, it no longer exists.” The policy failed, he seems to be arguing, because Canadians could not unite behind it — not because it didn’t achieve its objective of reducing gun crime.

Mr. Trudeau’s definition mirrors the Liberal leadership race itself. It’s not the substance that matters, but popularity with Canadians. By that measure, no other candidate comes close to Mr. Trudeau; a rocket scientist is no match for a rock star. It is a foregone conclusion that Mr. Trudeau will win, because the party needs a winner, and if the polls are to be believed, no one else would take the Liberals back into contention for government.

Until these latest gun-registry remarks, that is. He simply doesn’t seem to understand why so many Canadians were happy when the Conservatives axed the program.

The definition of a failed public policy is not one that divides, but one that doesn’t deliver on its promise. Failed public policies can be very unifying at the outset — think of U.S. president Lyndon Johnson’s pledge to wage war on poverty, which helped him to a landslide victory in the 1964 American election — but over time prove to be failures, based on their outcomes. In the case of anti-poverty policies, those outcomes included unintended consequences, such as encouraging out-of-wedlock births, and discouraging the work ethic. The policies weren’t a failure because they divided Americans, but because they left many people worse off than before.

Other public policies, such as the Canadian long-gun registry, are failures from the start, often because they represent a knee-jerk response to a demand for action, evidence be damned.

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In the wake of the Montreal massacre in 1989, politicians and ordinary citizens naturally wanted to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again. It is perfectly understandable that those directly affected by the event, such as the relatives of the victims of Marc Lépine, would support gun control. It is also perfectly understandable that the Liberals, once in office in 1993, would embrace the concept, since the policy polled well in their main base of support — urban Canada — while the Reform Party’s more rural voters staunchly opposed it.

But that pandering to populist sentiment ignored the fact that registering long guns would not stop deranged killers. As columnist Andrew Coyne notes in a thoughtful piece on the notion of populism this week, populist sentiment leads parties to enact policies based on “things that everybody knows,” as opposed to hard facts. But the wisdom of crowds is unreliable: Just because voters can unite on measures, even across party lines, does not mean that they will make life better for those same voters.

Nor does it mean that popularity today is a guarantee of popularity tomorrow. Uniting Liberals to a politician’s cause by saying whatever they want to hear, depending on what part of the country they’re in, will lead to charges of hypocrisy and pandering. For a candidate with such great expectations as those of Justin Trudeau, it is even more dangerous: Witness the demise of Progressive Conservative leader Kim Campbell after flying so high in the polls before the federal election in 1993.

The final irony here is that Mr. Trudeau is also on record as saying that the Liberals should adopt evidence-based policies. Such policies imply that research is done before, not after the fact: They may be based on the experiences in other countries, or the failures and/or successes of experiments at home. The long-gun registry is an example of failure.

His words this week should give Liberals pause to consider all the evidence before they make him leader — and demand more proof that he does, in fact, have the right stuff.